Having a high intelligence level shouldn’t mean you owe anybody to ‘make it big’, regardless of what that means.
Not to cope with this but for me it was more that I was smart enough as a kid to coast through school without putting in any effort, not paying attention in class, not taking notes, not revising and often not even doing homework and just getting good marks on exams from knowing things already or just applying some logic to the questions and because the school system only cares about getting as many kids as possible a passing grade, the school didn’t care and just left people like me to our own devices and focused all the resources on the kids that were failing. Then when I got to A levels/ uni, where things suddenly got way more difficult, I just hadn’t developed and of the skills to actually learn stuff like that and I floundered (and I’m sure having ADHD didn’t help).
So for me at least it was less about burnout and more about my “natural smarts” only taking me so far and the school system failing me (and me also failing myself)
Yes, this is so it for me too. It wasn’t until high school that I was like, “But why am I failing when I didn’t before?!” And a teacher was like, “Umm, well did you study?” And my first thought was, “Why would I have to do that?”
I wasn’t told I was gifted, though I was told I was “Smart but undisciplined/lazy” by my dad all the time. Who seemed more angry that I was undisciplined than proud that I was smart.
Turns out I am just autistic. And while I’m smart about random but highly specific things I had (and arguably still have) no attention or patience for stuff outside my hyper fixations.
Also I interview terribly. Every job search has taken ages, but once I get a job I always end up making my bosses very happy with my performance.
I have a fairly middle of the road job for where I live miraculously but that’s probably because the lady who hired me was very pregnant and on her way out to maternity leave and wanted to be done looking for a new admin assistant. I’m definitely underemployed though.
How about being above average intelligence, but get placed in below average classes because one child study team person decided you had “auditory” problems while you were in kindergarten? I recently found out that my highschool guidance counselors lied about my placement tests and I should have been in honors science instead of remedial.
Plot twist: You’re gifted but don’t get recognized so you just sit in gen-pop, acing tests after taking naps in class… pissing off every teacher you encounter.
You then achieve penultimate success in all facets of life, personal and professional.
You start over for the challenge and end up even more successful.
Then you get diagnosed with cancer.
Or something. Totally not my story, nope.
Don’t overlook the journey looking for the destination, folks. You’re only robbing yourself of the one universal asset: Time.
Damn, sorry dude.
My gifted program (late 90s) literally consisted of:
- playing Oregon Trail
- playing Carmen Sandiego
- making a puzzle
- making and presenting an invention ~
- drawing pretty designs with a compass without knowing the actual math behind it ~
- making a didgeridoo and a rain stick
~ these classes were literally in a closet which was a part time “gifted” room.
What I wished they’d taught:
- how to study
- how to manage your time
- how and why to set goals for yourself
- how to start new habits
- how to be persistent
I went to 15+ schools before I graduated highschool, and depending on where I was I was either put into “gifted and talented”, the “extended learning program”, “fast path”, or “Accelerated Track”. Every place had a different philosophy of how to deal with kids who already knew how to read and do math.
Sometimes I would end up in a class with a bunch of quiet bookworms who wore church clothes every day and other times I would be surrounded by rambunctious and highly enthusiastic nerds.
Usually we would play computer games or play games designed to make us engage socially, but sometimes we would actually study interesting stuff in a deep way.
Every one of these programs seems to be a totally improvised and locally unique program. Nothing from the words they used for things to the books, brands, or activities seemed to have any consistency. Since I usually moved in the middle of the school year I would often see multiple versions of each grade’s program.
It made me really glad I didn’t grow up in a small town. Those people are getting screwed.
This is exactly it. So much of it was improvised. And that’s largely by design when you account for how most American schools are funded: unevenly through local levies.
Dang, THAT was the entirety of your school’s genius program? I assume your school was not in an affluent area.
mine was the same.
my school was in the bottom quartile of systems in my state. a quarter of the students were in poverty.
we also only had like 2 computers so we all had to play on them together and work in teams.
…yeah jocks getting life-changing injuries in their school years is actually pretty comparable to “gifted kids” getting traumatized by this shithole version of America
not funny ha-ha so much as what the fuck is wrong with americans, why are they like this to their kids
Reminds me of the bunnies and tortoise dance - the story behind it is that there’s fast learners, and then slower learners that have to work extra hard to keep up, more than the fast learners, but in the end they all burn out except the one last kid left alone. Sad af, cool dance, cool idea.
Not exclusive to the US. I’m Canadian and I found high school awful and traumatizing.
That’s too bad dude. Our highschool wasn’t perfect but we had a lot of teachers that cared. And it was an art highschool so we had 3 separate full time art teachers that covered different disciplines. It was awesome fr a person that liked art
I had teachers that cared a lot. It was everything else that I hated. The other students, the schedule, the mountains of rote work.
High school had this nasty vibe that made my skin crawl all the time I was there. I didn’t want to go to class anymore. I stopped going and eventually dropped out.
Decades later I finished high school through online courses and then went to university and got my degree. Wish I’d taken that option earlier.
That’s how my wife experienced school also, I think she started faking illness and then she quit around grade 10, later in life went to college and was an A student.
Single path seems unhelpful for many people
Meh…
I was successful in science/engineering for about 25 years before I burned out. I did make it, I’m just tired.
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. 23 years school then 7 years running a research lab and writing a couple NSF proposals that got accepted. I was happy to cash out, drop clearance, and take an industry job for WTF 2X the money after one year?! No regrets, even if my dissertation is now buried forever. I’m a sellout and I’m totally cool with it. I can do cool shit with my kids now.
Yeah, my “gift” was undiagnosed ADHD which has made life absolutely miserable to navigate once I left the extremely structured environment of school.
THANK YOU. You were over-praised by well intentioned but misguided educators.
They gave us participation awards for things they invented around us.
I swear, it was all to placate Boomer parents.
I never burned out. I developed hobbies and found I enjoyed more physical work.
yep. having a life outside of your work and having an identity outside of it is huge.
sadly i meet so few people who have this.
“I was good at math until they added letters”
“I used to get straight A’s”
“I was gifted untill they realised I was neuro divergent”
Bro you’re dumb now. Why should anyone care that you were above average as a literal child.
There is something to consider though if we are not helping people realize their full potential.
And I doubt that anyone truly gifted as a child is dumb now. Innate intelligence doesn’t just whiff away.
realizing your potential is your job. not anyone else’s. especially as an adult.
stop blaming other people for your failures and lack of drive. if you are unhappy with our life go change it up and become happy.
straight A’s
Well, at least you’re creative with your choice of punctuation across the board. 😅🤷🏼♂️
This guy wasn’t gifted
Is it really about explaining why they’re not more successful? Personally being “burnt out” was more of a realization that I don’t even want that kind of success, I just want to get as far away from the way my life was in highschool as possible.
Fuckin’ PREACH
“Gifted” programs are so fucked up.
They separate kids out for being “smart”, put them on a pedestal, endlessly gas them up with wildly unrealistic expectations and then only teach them how to be good students at the expense of all social development.
All these kids go into the world thinking that being good at math or memorization is 95% of what it takes to be successful when in reality it’s like 10% intellect and 90% social ability.
The worst part is that these kids usually aren’t even extra smart, they just have more involved parents.
It always ends up that the kid with infinite potential lives up to none of it and has a massive ego complex because they got gaslit into believing their parents pipedreams were realistic and that it’s their fault for not living up to them.
Edit: It’s really funny all the former gifted kids are taking this as a personal attack.
This is such a horrible take. Gifted programs offer accelerated offerings for children who are so goddamn bored in normal level classes. They allow people who to get ahead, give additional opportunity for faster advancement, and really don’t even separate kids that much.
Literally everyone is bored in normal level classes. Most of us just express it by getting bad grades so we’re excluded from the gifted stuff.
Everyone is goddamn bored in school. It’s school.
There’s a difference between bored by the monotonous structure we’ve built up for schooling, and bored that you already understood the material a week ago, but are stuck listening to the teacher try to get the class delinquent to pay attention so the Republicans won’t pull funding from the school for bad test scores
To put it longer “bored and taking a year of schooling in an already fully understood subject where the teacher spends 3x as long as necessary on each topic”.
‘That much’ is a sliding scale. A kid can be removed from class for a few hours a week, or per day, or altogether and put in programs at special schools.
Outside of grade skipping, the majority of gifted programs are stem(not that there isn’t lit gifted, but they tend to start later), I don’t think being fully accelerated out of your classes is a common “gifted” experience.
The variation is extensive across the incredibly uneven landscape of school districts for sure.
Nah I know way too many losers who are still talking about how much potential they had 15 years ago.
Having kids pulled into entirely separate classrooms is pretty dang separated so IDK what you’re on about.
Those programs just blow smoke up kids asses and set them up to fail.
So? There’s also a ton of kids who did actually leverage that to get through college faster and do well. Bitchy people gonna bitch. Gifted program didn’t accelerate my progress in life, but it certainly did help me not sit there bored in a low level math class all day with people who couldn’t or didn’t care to do basic equations.
Sounds like you just want to feel superior to people.
Having a massive ego without anything to show for it is a common symptom of “former gifted” kids.
Believe it or not, some people are more interested in academics than others, and catering to allow that is a net positive to society…
Being bored in lower level math classes is reality. It’s not a hypothetical
There’s a difference between catering to academic interests and making a narcissist boot camp for the children of overly ambitious parents.
It’s not hypothetical that these “gifted” programs don’t really have better outcomes in terms of making kids engaged with academics.
Imo it’s obvious that these programs aren’t for the kids, they’re for the overactive and insecure parents.
Now the “former gifted” bullshit is so ingrained in people’s identity that any criticism of the program is perceived as a direct attack.
Now the “former gifted” bullshit is so ingrained in people’s identity that any criticism of the program is perceived as a direct attack
The criticism in question is not “any” criticism, it’s an implication that such programs should be fully removed. There’s plenty of valid criticism to be had, like letting parents force their kids into these programs without proper testing, or the socioeconomic disparities that are present in such programs.
Your source is not available through my college, and it’s locked behind a paywall. Without being able to read beyond the abstract, it seems to be focused on early year including kindergarten gifted programs, rather than a more generalized take that includes middle school and highschool.
If it’s just elementary school, I will agree that gifted programs loss of socialization can be much more important even for those small time periods. However, your source does not seem to be making a general statement of all gifted programs.
1000x this.
I’m not going to mess up my kid the same way I got messed up.
I’m going to find a new and novel approach that will despite my best intentions mess him up in new and novel ways
Hey, that level of self awareness is way more than what the people who forced these shit programs had.
Nobody gets out of childhood unscathed or unscarred but having parents who actually listen goes a long way to reducing the pain.
Ehhh, to each their own. I was in those classes, fully separated streams. No idea why you’d assume having a more interesting class would nix social development. (You can’t learn to socialize if the teacher doesn’t have to slow down?)
Fully wide range of outcomes but a lot of the kids with the potential went and realized it. Sure, not all of us did but from my small circle one’s on the second highest court in Canada, one’s set up a reasonably famous company, one’s a cardiac surgeon etc.
(You can’t learn to socialize if the teacher doesn’t have to slow down?)
When do you talk to to other kids if not during class? Lunch was for study group, where we didn’t talk, and we didn’t get free periods or anything because it was just more class.
But the gifted class also has kids in it who talk to you.
Not when the teacher thinks we need to be better behaved than the normal kids because we were smarter than them. Not when everybody in the class has parents that beat them for coming home with a B. Not when…
I just had a relatively normal class with extra projects and more advanced math lessons. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on me, except for awakening an interest in the Aztecs that might have contributed to wanting to learn Spanish. It looks like that’s pretty standard from the study linked in this comment chain.
Ah, so it wasn’t the same. The person I was responding to was saying their fully seperated stream didn’t hurt them, but it sounds like yours was pretty integrated.
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No assuming needed, we talked about it openly, before quickly getting shushed by the teachers.
Wild, maybe Canada does ours differently? I was in 2 different programs over the years but we still had lunch, free blocks and still shot the shit a bunch in class. And then sports and other extra curriculars too.
Yeah, it sounds like my school took it a lot more seriously. There was always this cloud of “If you fuck this up, you’ll be one of the poors forever, so don’t get out of line” hanging over us.
That, and going to the library to study didn’t cost as much as extra-curriculars.
I’m talking about school in the US, I’m not sure how Canadian schools are structured.
In my school, they pulled all the “smart” kids(most just had parents who did 90% of the work) out of normal classes, gave them 2-3x the workload and moved the coursework up by half a grade.
I’m sure there are better programs but widely that’s how things were for American gifted students.
Many of the people I knew in those programs either turned out average or did extremely poorly because they had a massive ego with no social skills.
It’s to the point where I feel like the people who became successful were successful in spite of the gifted program and the people who turned out to be failures did so because of the gifted program.
It will be different in different places but this has been my experience in the US.
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Yeah, that sounds wild. Ours were opt in programs with some testing etc. Coursework was hard but I still hardly had any for homework etc.
Got to skip a few university classes as ours counted for them though which was useful. And yeah, the more I think about that grad class (decades ago now) the more impressed I am with what some of those folks went on to do.
Nice, it sounds like you went to a good school or a normal one outside the US.
I’m specifically talking about gifted programs in the US. Like most of our education system, they’re generally shitty unless you’re in a high privilege area in which case you’re probably going to a private school anyway.
In the same way American schools aren’t representative of Canadian schools - your experience at one American school isn’t representative of all American schools. Maybe cut back on the blanket statements about American schools.
Yes thank you for reiterating for me that I’m talking about American schools. Because as I stated I am talking about American schools.
In case anyone didn’t know I’m talking about American schools, as in not non-american schools.
Well, going by your literacy, I’m gonna guess you weren’t in the gifted classes. Completely misread what I said.
No I read it, it’s a pointless uhm ackshully
It’s pointless to point out that your singular experience at one school isn’t indicative of American schools at large? Knowing there are other people who have their own experiences in the world is a critical development stage you should have reached by now.
You know, everyone else in this thread has come with levelheaded replies sharing their experiences with gifted programs, and it’s a mix of some schools who did it right and others who did it wrong. All you’ve replied with is obstinate vitriol. Starting to think you’re just jealous you didn’t make it into the gifted programs…
I don’t think that it’s just the gifted kid programs that are causing these issues, I think it’s more foundational than that.
So much of school is focused on rote memorization, test scores, and grades that kids who do well end up having their entire sense of self-worth tied to their grades. Then they get out into the real world and no longer have those academic scores to tell them that they have any value.
It’s how we get stuff like this:
There’s so much more in this discussion like how kids who never are challenged by schoolwork don’t actually learn how to learn and therefore give up on something at the first hint of difficulty or challenge because their brain is conditioned to believe that either you’re instantly good at a thing or you’re a failure forever, or how there’s a real lack of teaching collaborative work in school despite that being like 90% of work in life, but that’s all too much for my tired brain to try to piece together into a comprehensible message. So instead I’ll just end with my usual meme on the subject: Beware, the “gifted kid to burnout trans girl with a praise kink” pipeline is real.
Im not sure you are correct as no one was telling us we would be successful because of these classes when I was in them.
What we DID miss out on was seeing kids learn how to do things we already knew. This would have been very helpful when I got to the point where I didnt immediately understand the lesson and found myself having to learn how to do things years after most kids learn how to be taught to.
The real problem IMO is watching others learn is useful to the process of learning and taking the kids who know the lesson out of the room deprives them of this experience which in the long run creates other problems.
That’s only fair until you consider you may be depriving the accelerated kid of opportunities just for the point of keeping them in the class to inspire others.
In my case being in the accelerated class meant I never learned how to learn and when at 13 I suddenly didn’t immediately understand literally everything in class from the get-go I didn’t know what to do. I never experienced that before. I could read and write in paragraphs at 3 I didn’t watch my peers learn and it was a rough go for a while.
It was cool to have my critical thinking skills developed earlier, as that’s what we did with accelerated students in my town, but IMO I personally might have benefitted by remaining in the class to see how kids learned.
They kept threatening us with the whole “if you don’t learn how to properly study, you’re going to find yourself having a lot of trouble in college”
That… Never came to pass.
I gotcha. The program I was in had us go to a different class once or twice a week (varied since I changed schools a few times) instead of separating us entirely from the rest of the students, which we still did our regular classes with. I can definitely see how isolating a select few into “ivory towers” could cause some issues.
Personally, I can’t say I experienced any of that. Especially the “extra involved parents” part.
I was in gifted programs from K-12. Turns out hyperlexia is now a well known indicator of autism.
From what I remember it was like 30% autistic kids, 60% helicopter parents and like 10% kids from international schools who were just light years ahead of everyone else.
I think it can be done right but not in an education system that’s so fundamentally shit to begin with.
Hey now. Some of us were smart but predated ADHD diagnosis. So we got put in there, did some fun higher maths, but still didn’t finish our homework and then barely graduated.
Yeah that’s definitely the good ending. My school did so poorly they changed the grading curriculum to be 50% homework based so I was cooked on that.
I did well on the tests but they made tests 15% and quizzes 12%. I don’t remember the rest of the breakdown but it was absolute bullshit.
They did it because the year above me had a 50% non graduation rate and my year had a 53% non grad rate.
The only reason the school didn’t get shut down is because it managed 47% the year after me and apparently the deal was 3 consecutive years of over 50% failure = shutdown.
Instead of all these random gifted programs that are all or nothing, we need to start treating earlier grades like high school where some students take advanced classes and others do the bare minimum.
My school did that. We had separated reading groups in like 3-4th grade (there were like 3 levels within the grade, effectively behind/expected/advanced), and same for math starting in 3rd.
By 7th, we had accelerated science classes available to us.
Our whole education system needs a rework. Between the dogshit structure and the universally low pay for teaching we are going to end up far far more ignorant than we are now.
I stand by that every class-year should begin with an explanation of why you’re expected to learn the topic and what skills you’re expected to develop in the class, along with a paragraph or two sent to the parents on it. It won’t fix everything, but it will encourage students to quit thinking of their literature classes as a waste of time because they’re going into STEM or that their science classes are a waste because they aren’t.
I hated civics class and thought it was boring, but my mom made clear I was inheriting this country and I needed to know how it worked so I paid attention and by the end I was the sort of person who doesn’t avoid jury duty and who doesn’t resent paying taxes, just what’s done with thst money. Similar for learning to write and speak from my father who made clear that a stem job involves a lot of writing and public speaking.
I agree 100%
I absolutely hated school until I got to college and took a C++ class. Suddenly I was having a blast because I could see purpose in what I was doing.
The reality of it is some people are good little drones who can work on pointless tasks because they were told to and people who aren’t and need to see why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Imo the gifted programs didn’t reward people because they were smart but because they were obedient.
in reality it’s like 10% intellectual and 90% social ability
That may be true for some lines of work like sales, but something like software engineering is closer to 10% social ability and 90% technical ability.
If you want to ever move up in your career that’ll have to change because engineering advancement inherently means becoming management.
The unfortunate reality is that we live in a collaborative world and if you can’t collaborate then you will not go far.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the world if you’re also the most easily ignored.
One person can only do so much especially when they’re competing with people who aren’t alone.
Engineering advancement inherently means becoming management
Not necessarily, at the company I work for, they have two advancement tracks for engineers: management and individual contributor. The individual contributor track goes something like associate engineer -> engineer -> senior engineer -> principal engineer with a bunch of different sub-tiers in those with raises associated with them. Yeah, you cap out at principal engineer, but at that point, you have a good salary and equity and would be considered a success by most metrics.
Yes any work is going to require collaboration, but that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of social skills. Even the most socially awkward person can explain technical requirements to a colleague and ask them to implement them. There’s a difference between communication skills and social skills, and success in academics requires good communication skills.
I’m not saying social skills aren’t valuable, I’m just saying they aren’t required to succeed in this current capitalist economy.
It was a long time ago but our gifted kid program was not about being a good student, since we had accomplished that already. it was random stuff life skill enrichment like making phone calls to a hotel to book a room (hotel had headsup we were actually booking). Or being a recess buddy to a kindergarten kid, to get their winter wear on them, etc
You’re experience must be an anomaly based on other comments and my anecdotes. When I went through school, the gifted courses were just advanced level classes that you had to meet a minimum threshold to be able to join. By highschool for us, you were picking which classes and electives you wanted to take plus the required classes each semester, so everyone one of my classes had different people in it. Everyone had to take biology, gifted or not, but the gifted could take algebra earlier than the rest of us.
I was not in the gifted classes, but one of my best mates was. He graduated with honors, graduated from university early with a double major in Biology and physics and never paid a penny in tuition. He got accepted to a very reputable medical school where he graduated with honors, and didn’t pay for tuition because he joined the military which paid for his med school, granted him guaranteed residency, and paid him an extra 40k a year during his residency. He’s now the chief of cardiology at his location.
I also graduated with another kid that graduated highschool as a junior in college with all of the college courses he took. He did not participate in the gifted kids classes but he was extremely smart. He never graduated college and last I heard he was a manager at a local theater.
Point being, your comment is a major generalization that I don’t believe is supported by fact. I don’t doubt that some places did handle gifted kids poorly, but I’d argue that wasn’t the norm.
Being gifted somehow made adults think I couldn’t be neurodivergent. So many wasted years of no treatment and misery.
Oh yeah the expectations put on those kids is so fucked.
I really disagree with whole concept of “gifted” in the first place because it implies that academic intelligence is the only “real” intelligence and that people all learn the same way or they’re just stupid.
It’s a super narrow worldview that actively harms kids in and out of the program.
In my case the “gift” was undiagnosed neurodivergence and that seems to be the case for a lot of people.
Yep! Only I was in the “could be good if she applied herself” group
Ah, fellow late diagnosed ADHDer
Those teacher notes still occasionally visit me in my nightmares.
